AI and ML Creating an Impact on Cybersecurity?

There is no doubt how Artificial Intelligence is changing the outlook of people towards technology. Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Neural networks all combined are making drastic changes in the field of technology and while science fiction always portrays AI in the form of robots with human like characteristics, it can encompass anything from google’s search assistant to Siri to the chat-bot that we see as a pop-up when we visit various sites.

So, if we discuss about AI or ML with cyber-security, it has a massive role to play with the latter one. Its main role can be considered to offload the work from human cyber-security engineers and to make use of its accuracy and fast algorithms to tackle the threats or problems that humans take a lot of time to solve. And the main advantage of this is that as the machine trains itself using AI and machine learning so if it encounters any threat it will train itself for the similar future threats and be able to handle them by itself. Currently, AI has already entered fields like healthcare, manufacturing, education and cyber-security. Cyber-security is the main concern for today’s digital world, there are still uncertainties about the impact of AI. Not just the corporate but also the government sectors are also trying to master AI and Machine Learning for the protection of data and creating more opportunities in the respective field.

What I have inferred is that cyber-security companies are making use of AI and ML now more than ever. They are providing insights and solutions using these new technologies and algorithms that would be otherwise impossible for humans to achieve alone. There are ‘n’ number of benefits of using cyber-security solutions utilizing AI and ML as it can greatly reduce the amount of time needed for threat detection and incident response, often being able to alert IT staff of anomalous or malicious behavior in real time. With the advancements in AI, many companies have started to use it as a powerful weapon against the cyber attacks and trespasses. AI allows you to automate the detection of threat and combat even without the involvement of the humans. Powering your data to stay more secure than ever. Since AI is totally machine language driven, it assures you complete error-free cyber-security services. Moreover, companies have also started to put more resources than ever for boosting AI driven technologies.

To leverage AI to the fullest, collaborating it with the right security-intelligence personnel is necessary against all the types of attacks. Malware and virus attacks are common in the cyber world. Highly skilled hackers know how to trigger the right attacks, leaving the company’s cyber cell no clues about what happened. And here AI can be made used and can be seen as a way to rescue. AI let the defenders protect and stay strong even against the series of attacks. The other area of cyber-security that can be affected by AI is the password protection and authenticity detection systems. Since passwords are much vulnerable, AI is implemented a lot over this section. By going through a lot of papers I came to know that the term for such security systems is bio-metric logins. AI is being used for the detection of physical characteristics like fingerprints, retina scans, etc making the system more safe and secure than ever. Now we should focus upon this, these are the physical entities being used for security and there’s a less chance of trespassing this type of security by hackers.

Also, there has been a progress over the period of time and several AI solutions have now been developed that permit the software to train itself autonomously, at least in part. When properly trained, AI threat analysis can apply human-like intuition to every interaction on the network and pluck a single strange packet from millions of others for human review, i.e., after sensing that something is not right it does not take decisions on its own rather assists the human or the user that is using the machine about the error or threat encountered. AI products when properly trained and monitored, solutions that detect threats using ML can reduce the time from breach to discovery, reducing the amount of damage an attacker can cause. Shortening the time to discovery is critical for security, especially because though the machine is still prone to cyber attack, the extent is being certainly reduced by this.

AI threat detection is not going to produce perfect results and will likely generate a fair number of false positives and negatives if it has not been trained on a sufficient amount of recent data. The system cannot be entirely automated or self sufficient, and it will require human oversight to determine the legitimacy of any alerts that the system produces. Still, for companies that do not have large cyber-security or IT budgets, an AI platform running through hundreds of gigabytes of network activity data on a daily basis can be as effective as several teams of IT staffers using conventional tools for threat detection.

So I will go by an example, a car is not attractive without its parts being fit in it. But by itself, it won’t  fit the parts in car either. But in the hands of a skilled mechanic, everything falls in place. That is largely the situation with AI today. It won’t replace human security engineers neither can it handle cyber-security on its own. However, it is now a critical tool for getting on top of cyber security, managing the volumes of threat data for better detection and response and keeping cyber defenses high enough to repel attackers before any serious damage can be done. As most of the features of AI are still uncovered, vulnerabilities also exist regarding its usage. It’s not only the white hat hackers who know how to put AI as an Armour but there are even the black ones who are using it as their weapons.

The black hat people have also started to explore for how AI can be a threatening concern for them as well. That means that the people with the wrong intentions have also started to gain authority over AI, making them more powerful and skilled to get their things done. They have started to develop the hacks and methodologies in order to break against the cyber securities.Although companies have specific cyber-security cells still the sophisticated attackers somehow find their ways towards breaking the breaches.

Unfortunately, AI is already being used for some serious wrong ends by hackers and other cyber criminals.Cyber criminals are using AI to spread the threat faster and target more vulnerable machines.

In conclusion, as AI is adding values to the security sectors of the corporations and individuals as well, it is also spreading more power in the wrong hands. In order to give AI more authority in the near future for the security purposes, we need to stay sure that it stays with the white hat people only. Though AI is still in the developing stage, there is a lot more to explore about it. With time we will be able to classify it as really beneficial or not.There are definitely two sides to the coin when it comes to AI, and in all situations, the benefits must be weighed against the potential downsides. Whilst the use of the technology continues to grow, a robust, defense-in-depth Information Assurance strategy is needed to keep an organisation’s data as safe as it can be. Ultimately, organisations need to spend time shaping the machine learning output with business context, rather than just using it as a technical asset and to technical stuff only.Which will ensure that the results are more meaningful and insightful. This will require analysts to spend time on the system and infuse it with their context and insights and make AI success in the field of cyber-security to reduce threats.

Disclaimer: This article is based on my personal views. Image Source: Google Images